Sims was an Alabama-based journalist before joining Trump's presidential campaign in August 2016, a role he parlayed into a special assistant to the President position before later serving as the director of White House message strategy.

In "Vipers," Sims dishes on the oft-told back-biting among senior Trump administration figures, and he doesn't let himself off the hook for the moments when his eagerness to serve the president led him to take shots at his colleagues. Most notably, Sims writes about helping Trump craft his so-called "enemies list," comprised of White House aides Sims believed were disloyal to the president.

And while Sims takes issue with some of the president's stances — Trump's hardline position on refugees, among them — the staunchly conservative Sims remains proud to have served in the Trump White House.

On the day of "Team of Vipers" release this past Tuesday, Sims sat down with INSIDER's politics editor Anthony Fisher for an extended interview. (Editor's Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

INSIDER: Why did you decide to write about your experience in the White House?

Cliff Sims: I wanted to write this because every book that I've seen about the Trump presidency to this point has been an anti-Trump view. Either just wanting to burn the place down and set him on fire or, you know, an unabashedly pro-Trump, kind of sycophantic book. It's the most talked about presidency in history and I want to tell you the truth about what's going on in there.

INSIDER: So, on the spectrum of anti-Trump bashing or sycophancy, where would you put your book?

Sims: Man, I haven't really thought about it in those terms. It's kind of good, bad, and ugly of [the Trump White House]. So I guess I would put it right in the middle. That's what I was shooting for.

INSIDER: What were you most looking to expose from your time in the White House?

Sims: I'm trying to help you understand the way that Trump ticks. How he approaches decision-making. Everything that guy says is newsworthy. You could fill volumes of books with the things that he's said, but every story in my book helps you understand it in a larger context.

I had a unique vantage point of someone who had seen him operate up close and personal in various settings. Foreign leaders dealing with Congress, behind the scenes recording different things. I think I'm probably most critical of myself of anyone in the entire book. I just want to be the guy who was in the room who's willing to give it to you straight.

President Donald Trump speaks on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office of the White House, January 28, 2017 in Washington, DC. Also pictured, from left, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. On Saturday, President Trump is making several phone calls with world leaders from Japan, Germany, Russia, France and Australia.Drew Angerer/Getty Images

INSIDER: The title of the book is "Team of Vipers." Can you speak specifically about how you were a viper? Who in the White House did you hurt, and why?

Sims: I paint a lot of scenes of the internal machinations of the staff-on-staff violence as I call it. You know, everybody's going after everybody. I participated in a lot of that and there were some people who I helped engineer their departure and then there were people who helped engineer mine. So it's kind of like what goes around comes around in that way.

One of the scenes in the book that has gotten the most pickup is where the president's really frustrated because he's reading all these stories where unnamed White House officials are not just trashing a policy, they're trashing him personally. And he's like, "Who are these people that work for me?" So I ended up in the private study just off the Oval Office sitting with the President of the United States, basically making a list of people that I think are probably behind some of this stuff.

As I looked back, [I realized] how lost in it all I had become. I didn't lie to the president. I didn't say anything I didn't think was untrue. I told what I thought was the truth about these people, but I didn't feel like there was anything honorable about stabbing my colleagues in the back to the president.

INSIDER: Ultimately, do you regret what you did?

Sims: I regret things like that. If I had to go do over again, I would have handled the situation differently where I'm sitting there with the president basically making an enemies list. I joke in the book that if this were a horror movie, this would have been the moment where you realized that the call is coming from inside the house.

INSIDER: You wrote about struggling with your Christian faith and the Trump administration's position on refugees.

Sims: It hits me very personally. We spent time in the Middle East working with Syrian refugees. So when we talk about that issue, I picture the faces of those kids and those moms and the people that I met over there. I saw firsthand what they're going through. I think the administration's stated policy goals on the refugee issue are good. We want to relocate these people to safe places as close to their homes as possible. We want to give special treatment to Christians or religious minorities who were persecuted in that part of the world.

INSIDER: It's totally understandable to have sympathy for persecuted religious minorities. But does your concern extend to Muslim refugees?

Sims: I would say 99% of the refugees that we worked with were Muslim refugees. The United States historically has been very explicit about persecuted religious minorities around the world. Even the State Department, the different ways they classify refugees, persecuted religious refugees are given favorable treatment.

The first job of the president is to secure the safety of the American people. There are ways you can ensure safety while also being welcoming, or at least, helping them there [in the Middle East]. I think that makes a lot more sense because a lot of refugees I've interacted with, they don't want to be Americans. They love their culture, the way that we love our culture. They love their life, they want to speak their language.

INSIDER: So, you were an anchor on Trump TV for a hot second. There was a lot of speculation that the president thought he was going to lose in 2016, and Trump TV was going to be his next big media gambit.

Sims: Man, I almost forgot about that. We were sitting around the war room in Trump Tower and somebody said, "We've got this giant online following, what if we just did our own show and the people will eat it up." So we just kind of started doing it. Next thing you know, we start getting all these media requests coming in asking if this was what Trump's going to do after he loses the election. It really wasn't. It was really just a handful of us idiots sitting around the war room deciding that we wanted to do it.

Riot police protect members of the Ku Klux Klan from counter-protesters as they arrive to rally in support of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S. July 8, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

INSIDER: I want to talk a little bit about the White House's reaction to the neo-Nazi murder of a protester in Charlottesville in 2017. You wrote that a lot of White House staffers were not happy with the president's response. How did you personally feel at the time?

Sims: I was really conflicted, because I think that we have completely lost nuance in the public discourse at this point.

When Trump says something like, "There's good people on both sides," it's a very provocative thing. For me, what I heard him say was, "There are good people who say we shouldn't have monuments to slavery." There are also people who say, "I think we should keep those monuments because I don't agree with slavery and I think racism is evil, but that's part of our history. And we should remember even the bad parts of our history, whichever side you're on, you can be a good person."

So if you like Donald Trump, you're hearing him say that. He's not very nuanced, but there is a nuanced argument there. If you think he's a racist, you think he just said that there are good white supremacists out there. I give him the benefit of the doubt, having spent time with him one-on-one. I have absolutely no reason to believe that Donald Trump has a racist bone in his body.

Our country, for generations, has been dealing with the consequences of slavery and segregation. And the president has a unique platform, a giant bully pulpit to be someone who brings racial reconciliation and healing. That is a part of the job that I think that the president could do better at.

One of the great mischaracterizations of Trump is that he's a terrible boss, yelling at everyone and "you're fired." That he's just going crazy the whole time. I actually had a great experience working for the guy.

One of the scenes in the book I liked most is when the Congressional Black Caucus comes in to meet with him and they are loaded up to really give it to him. And they get in the room with him and the door closes and they find out the same thing everybody else does, which is you just can't be in the room with the guy and not end up liking him. He's a great host. He's having a good time. He's fun.

President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he departs the White House June 8, 2018 in Washington, DC. Trump is traveling to Canada to attend the G7 summit before heading to Singapore on Saturday for a planned US-North Korea summit.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

INSIDER: In the book, you seem to be riding the fence when it comes to media coverage. On the one hand you concede it's dangerous for Trump to refer to the media as "enemies of the people." But you also clearly think that there's a preponderance of misreported pieces on Trump, and that that's evidence of an unhealthy bias. What do you think the press gets right about the president and what do you think they've gotten the most wrong?

Sims: I do have some discomfort with that particular phrase "enemy of the people" because of the historical connotation, the ways that has been used in the past. I have no idea if Donald Trump is aware of the historical connotation or if he's just shooting from the hip. The fake news thing doesn't bother me as much. And the reason is because I've seen reports on tons of meetings that I was in that were just bull crap.

The things I think the media gets right about Donald Trump, they're correct in saying that there is a relatively chaotic environment [in the White House]. What they get wrong is how that manifests itself. It's not a universally bad thing is that there's a kind of this creative chaos going on.

My biggest beef with the media is an overreliance on anonymous sources. It's really frustrating and I don't think it's fair as a reader. I'm reading these stories and I'm like, I don't know who these people are. They have an ax to grind. And I'm supposed to take this reporter's word for it.

One of the reasons I think my book is unique is because I'm willing to put my name to this stuff. You can read some of these other books and see what anonymous sources say and you don't know who they are. I'm right here. My name's on the dang thing. You can read it and think what you want.

INSIDER: The president seems none too pleased with the fact that you wrote this book. ( Trump tweeted Tuesday morning: "A low level staffer that I hardly knew named Cliff Sims wrote yet another boring book based on made up stories and fiction. He pretended to be an insider when in fact he was nothing more than a gofer. He signed a non-disclosure agreement. He is a mess!") What would you say to Trump about why you wrote this book?

Sims: I would say that my goal here was just to tell the truth. I'm not trying to set you on fire, I'm not trying to make up stories about you. And he's not going to read the book, he's going to base it off of the press coverage. I'm a conservative, and I'm still a supporter of the Trump agenda. I want a lot of those things to be accomplished and I think I did a service here of telling the truth about what's going on in [the White House].

And a lot of it, he would actually be surprisingly happy about because I defend him on things he cares about. We talked about the race issue, I defend him on that. In the book we talk about the Russia thing, I think Russia thinks a farce. We couldn't collude with the office next door. You think we can collude with a foreign government? Give me a break.

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